The Autobiography of an Idea

doing great deeds. Here was action in the open. He could live these scenes. He could visualize these acts even within the deadly philistine air of Washington Street and its Rice School where he was supposed to know that 2 ∶ 4 ∶∶ 4 ∶ 8. He did not especially care for the standardized lady in the case who was always ravishingly beautiful and always eighteen; and to the villain he was sometimes lenient, but the hero, that magnificent man-god whose ear had just been grazed by the arrow of a huge red savage⁠—him he took to his bosom. He got a thrill out of every page, which was more than he ever got out of the school. He was to remain at this school for several years, during which time he slowly became citified. His activities naturally spread over an ever widening field; and these years were filled with multifarious details large and small. His geographical ventures extended from South Reading as a center to Stoneham, Woburn, North Reading, Saugus and Ipswich; and from Boston as a center to Rockport, Gloucester, Marblehead, Salem, Lynn and Nahant; and southward into Jamaica Plain. Between Boston and South Reading were dotted, as villages or hamlets, Somerville, Malden, Melrose, Greenville and South Reading Junction. West of the Junction was a small affair called Crystal Lake, with bare and sterile surroundings, including an icehouse on its northern shore. The big pond to the north of South Reading⁠—then a village of possibly two thousand souls⁠—was officially known as Lake Quannapowitt. From the western shore of this lake projected a promontory, and within this promontory was a cemetery.

During these years, Louis Sullivan, always inquisitive and foolhardily curious, had ferreted out every street, alley and blind court, and dock and wharf from end to end and crosswise within the limits of Boston, and had made partial explorations of Charlestown, Chelsea, and South Boston. Thus there gradually arose within his consciousness a clearing sense of what a city meant objectively as a solid conglomerate of diverse and more or less intricate activities. He began indeed to sense the city as a power⁠—unknown to him before⁠—a power new-risen above his horizon; a power that extended the range and amplified the content of his own child-dream of power as he had seen it manifested in the open within the splendid rhythm of the march of the seasons. Nevertheless, he saw, in his boy-way, and felt it strongly, a great mysterious contrast between the two. In the open all was free, expansive and luminous. In the city all was contraction, density, limitation, and a cruel concentration. He felt that between himself and the city, as such, lay a harsh antagonism that seemed forever insoluble; as though men had made the city when they were mad; and that as it grew under their hands it had mastered and confined them. Yet men, women and children seemed to move about freely enough at certain hours. These waves of doubt and apprehension came and passed at intervals, but each wave left its precipitate, in solution as it were, in the boy’s quizzical mind. He became less and less unfriendly toward the school, as sporadic knowledge crept out of his books and took on a certain segregated appearance of validity, having slight connection, however, with his own world. He ceased to be wholly rebellious, and took his small doses of formal routine education much as he might take a medicine supposedly for his good. Thus far his father had been his only successful teacher.

The boy had acquired and was continuing to acquire the education he possessed partly through a series of shocks⁠—frequently humiliating⁠—which inverted his illusions into realities; partly through his own keen powers of observation, and perhaps something in the way of intuition; but mainly and fundamentally through his high sensitiveness to externals which, always with him, took on character, definition and, as it were, a personality. He was now ripe for another shock.

One day his father took him on a walk to South Boston, and made him run up a high hill on the top of which was a reservoir. This altitude reached, a great view spread before them. The boy at once became exalted with awe at the living presence and expanding power of Mother Earth. Never⁠—since the long forgotten days of Halifax⁠—had he reached such a peak of observation. His father’s love for “scenery” had taken them there. As the boy gazed in thrilling wonder, his father called attention, one after another, to special points of beauty in the land and waterscape, finally coming around to the Blue Hills, which indeed were blue and enchanting against the far horizon and its haze. After explaining the nature of the haze, father called attention to two outstanding peaks, near together but differing in size, and asked his son a point-blank question: Which of the two hills is the larger? His son walked straight into the trap, saying that of course the larger one was the larger⁠—why did Papa ask? Then the trap fell⁠—knocking Louis senseless⁠—for Papa said, (beyond a doubt maliciously he said it) that the smaller was the larger. When Louis came to, he protested vehemently; but Papa said he had been there and knew. Then, relenting, believing he had carried his practical joke far enough, he told his son, seriously, that the effect, the appearance, the illusion was, in fact, due to what he called perspective; and the nature of this particular perspective, and perspective in general, he explained with notable skill, simplicity, and with many objective instances. But Louis instead of receiving this information with acclaim and joy, as a new world opening before him, was deeply saddened and perturbed. His father, sincerely believing he was educating his own, came near to destroying him. He was no psychologist, he had indeed but little human sympathy or insight⁠—hence he had no suspicion of what was going on beneath the surface of his own son. For had not that son built up